Breaking the stigma: the economic returns to trades education in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to document early earnings trajectories based on the educational pathways travelled by students in Ontario, Canada, with a particular focus on the outcomes of those that opt for training in the trades. Design/methodology/approach This study draws on a new administrative linkage to track the trajectories of over 61,000 students from the Toronto District School Board as they enter post-secondary education (PSE) and then the labour market. It uses regression modelling to estimate early net disparities in earnings based on PSE pathways. Findings We estimate that graduates from the “Red Seal” trades earn substantially more than counterparts emerging from college or university programs, even net of demographics and academic performance measured at the high school level. Originality/value This study is the first in Ontario, Canada, to analyse early earnings trajectories across the full spectrum of post-secondary pathways available to students. It provides useful evidence-based insights that can inform future system design and reform.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it